


A Surveyor's Tale

by Tamoline



Category: The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-01-26 19:49:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1700423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/pseuds/Tamoline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four women - an anthropologist, a biologist, a psychologist and a surveyor - form the twelth expedition into Area X. As they go deeper into the territory, past and present, memory and thought will start to blur and change. Integral to this is a past relationship between two women, and what it means for the present.</p>
<p>This is the surveyor's tale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lorraine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/gifts).



> This will contain major spoilers for Book 1 - Annihilation.

As you come out of the hypnotic trance, Area X clenches around you like a fist.

Not literally, of course. But that’s the overwhelming impression you have, as you become consciously aware of your surroundings.

Area X clenches around you like a fist.

And that’s not like you. You don’t tend to think in metaphor - you’ve always been far more concerned with reality. Distances, sizes, shapes. A concrete measure of what’s there. The greatest and most primal fear is that of the unknown. Once you’ve mapped something, it loses that power over you. Maybe it’s just a side effect of travelling in a trance - you’ve lost your usually iron-clad bearings.

Maybe it’s not, though. You’re intimately familiar with the fates of some of the previous expeditions into Area X. Some came back different. Some didn’t come back at all.

But some came back fine, with nothing but reports of a pristine wilderness. That’s going to be your team, you’ve already decided. Measure twice, cut once. You can get everyone back in one piece.

First things first. You orient yourself, build a map of the immediate locale in your mind. Eleven feet to the nearest bush. Sixty to the stream. Ninety yards to that stand of trees. You can’t look back, though, at the border you just crossed. You were told how important that was during training, time and time again. That inability makes you feel uncomfortably exposed, an itching desire to just *make sure* that creeps into your mind and…

But no. You won’t. You’re going to get everyone out of this, and that means following protocol. You focus on the others to distract yourself from the gaping void behind. The anthropologist, five feet to your left, getting to her feet after having fallen over. She hardly spares you a glance, no more than the rest of the expedition. The biologist, six feet to your left, regarding the world with a blank, almost incurious air. 

The psychologist - the designated leader of the expedition - standing about eighteen feet away, watching the rest of you orient yourself. As the only one who guided you through the border, without the benefit of the trance, you’d expected to see… something different about her. Maybe some leftover confusion from the hallucinations the border is supposed to induce.

You can’t see anything like that. Instead, she’s looking at you all levelly, assessingly, as you recover. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That was the least startling reentry I could manage.” Her smile might have been intended to be reassuring - maybe even apologetic - but it isn’t. Something about it rings false, and you can’t help the anger boiling up within you and you swear at her, at the world.

At Area X for daring to try and clench around you like a fist. Even as you push it away. Establish your boundaries. Make the unknown - at least this patch of it - known.

You try to catch the anthropologist’s eye again - as the most known part of the surroundings - but she doesn’t meet it, seemingly more interested in the psychologist. So, so different to how you met. So, so different to how you related the incident to the psychologist in your debrief before the expedition.

“You understand why we’re asking,” she’d asked you as you sat in the almost featureless interview room.

“It doesn’t matter,” you’d told her, sullenly, anger rising within you, though whether it’s the old, aching one or simply the discomfort of having a stranger sit in judgement over you is impossible to tell. “The anthropologist and I, we’ve been over for years.” You can’t remember now whether it had been early enough in the process that you’d used the anthropologist’s name in the interview, or if they’d already taken it away from you. For your own safety, they’d said. Just remember your roles, nothing else.

You can remember the psychologist’s smile clearly. Sharp. Sharp enough to slice through steel. “Any link between the members of the expedition could be important. Could have unforeseen consequences if not mapped beforehand. Thoroughly.”

“Fine.”

“From the top, then.”

You had closed your eyes and cast your mind back. You had met whilst you were still with the Army, on domestic garrison duty. You had been off-duty, off-base, trawling through the local bars. She had been in the fourth one you’d visited, sitting on a stool at the bar. Despite the fact that the place had been almost full, your memory is that there had been an actual bubble of empty space around her, left by the other inhabitants of the place, as though they were shunning her, unconsciously or not. Maybe that had just been an impression, though, or an artefact of your later recall, though. She always did have a curiously untouchable air when she had wanted to. Whatever the case, she had managed to rock that seat at the bar, though, sitting there as though she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to do.

You had to admire that about a lady.

She turned as you squeezed through the crowd, a smirk on her lips as she looked at you, as if she was already aware of you. ‘Do you dare make a move?’ was the unspoken challenge and, hell, how could you refuse an invitation like that. “Hey,” you had said. It must have been a high stool she had been sitting on, because you remember looking up at her, despite the fact that she’s a good few inches smaller. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Her smile had sharpened approvingly. “Evening, soldier,” she’d said. ‘Don’t mind if I do.”

And things, as they say, had progressed from there.

There’s nothing of that now. If she’s aware of you as anything more than just another team member, she’s doing an excellent job of hiding it. And… she’s right. It doesn’t matter. Not now, not here. You get your head back in the game, sling your pack back onto your back and prep yourself for the trip ahead. Barring an incident, you’ve got four days until you reach base camp and start the job of repairing what’s there. You run through the map in your mind again, comparing it with the landmarks you can see from here.

You take a deep breath and exhale slowly.

You can do this. Go first one mile, then the next. Slowly, it becomes easier. Slowly, you stop needing to guard against it, against the possibility of it sneaking up, clenching like a fist around you. It becomes easier to measure it, map it, make it known. Defang it.

It’s a little over five miles before you see the first sign of the former human habitation. What at first glance looks like a large bush with a few skeletal trees sticking out of it, like ribs on a corpse, resolves into the overgrown remnants of a house.

No one knows what happened to the people who lived here when the Area formed thirty years ago. The first expedition reported finding nothing but a pristine wilderness. Looking at the ruin, a small insane part of you can’t help wondering if the Area clenched around them like a fist too, squeezing until nothing at all was left. The more sane part of you knows that nothing like that happened. Rationally, the inhabitants were probably affected like some of the… less successful expeditions, driven to self destruction either individually or as a group.

But it’s pointless wondering, and such speculations have never been your forte, anyway. You remember a conversation you had once with the anthropologist about how every posting you’d ever been on had its own superstitions, and your current one in particular seemed to sprout them like weeds. You’d rolled your eyes about this, and she’d raised an eyebrow and laughed, saying, “Because, of course, you are immune to such things.”

Slightly drunk, you’d replied, probably far too earnestly. “Okay, one friday a month, we have rabbit for dinner. In the summer, it’s generally a barbecue. In the winter there’s a little more variety, casserole or pan fried or roast or whatever the cooks feel like doing. And it’s like pretty much everyone eats the rabbit on those nights, like it’s a sacrament or something.”

“So does that mean that you abstain on these rabbit fridays?”

You had shrugged. “I like my meat too much.”

Her lips had curved again. “So, really, you aren’t any better than they are. You just have a different excuse.”

You had gripped your bottle hard against the mockery you could see in her eyes. Sometimes, she’d just get in these moods where she’d love to rile you, provoke your temper. She said that there was nothing quite like angry sex. “It’s not just that,” you’d insisted. “We have a lot of albino rabbits around the base. Lots of rumours about why - colour’s been leached out of them by ground pollution, they’re escapees from some lab experiment. Some people even call them ghost rabbits. Point is, no one will eat them. Brown rabbits, no problem. Even brown and white dapples. The albinos, no one will touch them. It’s nonsense. They’re the most numerous and the easiest to hunt. If it’s pollution, then we shouldn’t be eating any of them. And what effect is a lab experiment going to have after several generations? But no one would listen to me, not even after I hunted a few down.” You remember the shots ringing out, the fluffy white forms streaked with crimson, falling over, twitching. “Sent them off to a friend who works at a lab for tox screens. You know what came back?”

She’d shaken her head, still amused.

“Nothing. The damn things were cleaner of contaminants than pretty much anything they’d ever seen. Didn’t make a bit of difference to the cooks. So I prepared one myself, ate it in full view of everyone the next rabbit friday.”

“Did you convince anyone?”

You had shaken your head. Everyone in the mess had just looked away as you’d eaten the rabbit, like you hadn’t even been there. “But that’s the point. People will believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of whether the science backs them up. Not me, though.”

That’s the way you’ve always been. So this new… tendency to the metaphorical is concerning, to say the least. Does this mean the Area is affecting you already? You debate whether or not to tell the psychologist. In the end, you decide not to for the moment, but keep a watchful eye out to see if it persists, or if additional symptoms present.

Dusk eventually falls after a day of trekking, and a low moaning starts up, from nowhere and everywhere. There’s a moment of tension before you realise, rationalise. “It must be the wind,” you announce to the rest of the group. The anthropologist lets out a small laugh. The biologist merely tilts her head, gazing off into the gathering dimness. The psychologist, as ever, seems most concerned with the reactions of the rest, looking down at you from her advantage of several inches. She nods after a few seconds, and gives the order to set up camp.

The moaning slowly lessens in intensity, but in the way that leaves you struggling to focus on it even as it does so, to the point where you’re still straining to hear it ten minutes after it’s faded completely. And then, suddenly, as you’re in the middle of setting up your tent, there’s a sensation as though a great weight has been lifted off your shoulders. It’s only then that you realise that you’ve been carrying the sensation - of Area X being clenched around you like a fist - all day, and you’d just normalised it.

You can’t help wondering if there’s anything else you’ve become inured to, that you’re not even noticing any more.

With the new lease of energy full night has brought you, it takes a while for you to fall completely asleep. Despite the coolness of the air, no one has been inclined to close the entrances to their tents, so you take the opportunity to study the others as they sleep. The anthropologist seems smaller than you remember, as though exposure to the Area has shrunk her, somehow. You can barely see the biologist, between the remnants of the banked fire and her seemingly determined attempt to burrow into the soft earth. And the psychologist, in stark contrast to the anthropologist, seems even larger when asleep, as though when awake she hides so much of herself that she physically shrinks.

When you finally sleep, you dream of the anthropologist, her hands on you, your tongue in her. A mix-tape of the physical highlights of your relationship. But interspersed with them are flashes of the white briefing room and the unemotional voice of the psychologist asking you intimate details about your relationship. 

One moment you’re in the alleyway behind the bar that first night, alcohol and the thrill of discovery driving you to do things you’d never normally contemplate. The next is the white room and the psychologist asking if you ever dabbled with restraints. And then you’re handcuffed to a bed in a motel, and a lit candle is illuminating the twist of her smile as she murmurs, “Well, it *is* your birthday…”

You wake up orgasming with the voice of the psychologist in your ears, asking you *exactly* what was it like when she made you come.

For a moment, wild anger possesses you, and you almost march over to the psychologist’s tent, and demand to know where the hell she got off going into those kind of details. But then you remember - it was only a dream. As far as you can remember, that never actually happened.

As far as you can remember being the operative phrase. There are blanks spots in your memory - in all of your memories. Blank spots that you had been assured were put there for your safety, to help you survive the rigours of the Area.

You almost go over there anyway, your temper demanding that you extract some kind of answer from the psychologist. You almost go over to the anthropologist to - find out if she’s been having the same dreams? Seek some kind of comfort? Just talk to someone about what’s whirling through your head? In the end, you suppress the urge. After all, like as not, it’s just some kind of reaction to the stresses of being here. You have only the flimsiest of evidence that anything actually happened. 

Besides, you’re on a mission here. You’re going to get everyone out, and you can only do that if everyone is pulling together. An accounting can wait until after everyone’s safe.

Morning light brings the pressure back, though it’s more like a popping in your ears than the fist around your head. If the anthropologist had any dreams about you, she doesn’t show any signs - she doesn’t treat you any differently than she has any other morning since training began.

The psychologist, as ever, is watching. Even when you can’t see her, the pressure of her eyes is something you can always feel.

The next few days pass the same way - travel during the day, resting at night. Dusk always brings that low moaning. As it starts, there’s always a brief pause as everyone stops to listen to it. Its cessation always gives you a brief euphoria. And daylight always brings the pressure back, though by the third day it feels more like a jolt to wake you up properly than anything else.

If you dream after the first night, you don’t remember them.

After four days, you reach the base camp established by the expeditions, and start the dual tasks of renovating the structures you find there and scouting the local area. The anthropologist - being a former architect - takes point on the first, and you take charge of the latter. The psychologist spends most of her time using her size and strength helping the anthropologist, whilst the biologist is usually with you, collecting samples for analysis.

When you’d known the anthropologist before, you’d never actually known what she did. She had always kept you away from the rest of her life, kept an invisible wall that you’d never quite managed to breach. At first that had been fine - you hadn’t exactly been looking for something deep and meaningful. Later - well, later, you’d just come to accept it as the way things were. It had become a kind of stasis that you’d found yourself trapped in without really realising it.

You can’t actually point to a date when you started to wish that things would change. By the time that you’d noticed how much you’d wanted that, it had grown beneath the surface, taken deep root before sending tentative feelers for the surface.

You’re not proud of how you reacted when you realised this - a series of violent arguments that culminated in smashed crockery before you collapsed to the ground, crying, just asking for her to tell you something - anything - about her real life.

She’d given you a few tidbits - that she was employed at a local institute, that she’d grown up in a nearby county - just enough to end the current argument. Give you hope that things could get better from here on out.

It wasn’t actually the end of your relationship. But it certainly didn’t help.

After three days of work, you’re ready to start the initial trek to the lighthouse, the only intact sign that humanity was ever here. It’s during the next day that you stumble across *it*.

It’s- your initial impression is that it’s the surface of a huge abscess, an infection that… But that’s just irrational. It’s just a circular slab of stone roughly sixty feet in diameter. An *impossible* slab of stone. It’s not on your maps, nor on the maps of your predecessors.

“This is impossible,” you mutter.

It can’t be here. Yet here it is, able to be seen, measured and, you take a breath, reaching forward, even touched.

It can be *known*.

“And yet here it is,” the biologist says, more animated than you’ve ever seen her. “Unless we’re having a mass hallucination.”

You clear your mind and set your mind to your job, to measuring the (abscess) slab. It proves to be 61.4 feet in diameter and raised 7.9 inches above the ground at your initial point of contact. As you make your way around it, the height above the ground varies by plus or minus 2 inches. Mostly plus - decaying moss has raised the height of the ground on the west side. Within a few degrees of due north, you discover a rectangular opening. For a moment, you can only think of it as an open sore, but it’s *not*. It’s *not*.

The opening drops down to a staircase, which in turn leads further down into the depths. A tunnel. Nothing else.

The others gather around the *tunnel* with you. “I’m excited by this discovery,” the psychologist says. “Are you excited too?”

There’s something in her voice, an inflection that somehow doesn’t quite read true. Like she’s trying to provoke a reaction. Feeling pushed, you shrug but don’t otherwise respond, but other two respond in the affirmative, the biologist even speaking once more.

It’s almost night so you retreat a safe distance and make camp, but the only topic is the tower. The anthropologist wants to move on, but you can’t stand the thought. It feels too much like leaving an enemy at your backs. Or, more accurately, a complete unknown in a place that has too many of them already. Luckily, the biologist backs you, as does the psychologist after some pushing.

The smile she gives as she does so follows you down into nightmares.

The next morning you take point on the expedition that leads into the depths. By this point, you’ve almost managed to convince yourself that your initial impression was nothing but something left over from a nightmare. 

Still, as you drop lightly onto the staircase, something within you expects to feel the give of biological material under your feet.


	2. Chapter 2

You land on a surface as solid as the stone you’d known it would be. The light from your assault rifle illuminates off-white walls, not pallid, or…

Measurements. Trust what you measure.

The steps head downwards at a 1:1 ratio for 20 feet before it opens up into a larger room. Circular. One foot 10 inches smaller than the slab above. The ceiling of the chamber is 8 feet 3 inches above the floor. Which means… the ceiling must be 13 feet 5 inches below the top of the slab. 

You almost expect to feel confined here, despite the fact that the chamber fades into darkness at its furthest extent. But you don’t. In fact, there’s a faint sensation of being attenuated, drawn out of your skin to fill this chamber. It takes you a few minutes to realise that the pressure you’ve felt every day since you entered the Area is absent here. Maybe it’s linked to light levels, if it exists outside your head at all.

Clearing the room, you find another doorway opposite the entranceway, a black gap that repels you almost as much as it draws you. Almost. A pressure of a different kind grips you as you take first one step towards it, then another. Something shines green in the darkness - or can you only see it when you blink your eyes?

Whatever. The doubt is enough to break you from your semi-trance. The immediate area is empty - safe as it’s going to get - so you signal to the others, and the anthropologist and the biologist descend to meet you.

The anthropologist gives her verdict on the room - nothing particularly illuminating - but as soon as she stops speaking, the biologist starts, almost chattering in her speed. Nervous? you wonder, but your attention has once again been captured by the black space at the end of room, and you slowly advance towards it again. But this time you feel more in control, more conscious of your actions. Maybe it’s the presence of the others, behind you though they are. Maybe it’s the fast-paced words of the biologist, chopping the silence into manageable pieces.

The green is there again, a slice against the darkness, curving downwards into the further darkness. It’s presence, more certain, more *real* than the last time, forces a gasp from your lips, and the others crowd in behind you.

The biologist commands you to hold the light, and starts to push past you. You tense for a moment then let her - at this distance, in this company, the attraction balanced evenly with the repulsion. Easier to just let someone else go first for once.

“Where lies the strangling fruit that comes from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth from the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…” says the biologist, reading down the green ribbon - though at this distance you can see it’s formed of many, smaller, ribbons. If you squint, it could be writing, a cursive script flowing down the wall into the depths.

It’s written in some kind of fungi, the biologist tells you. Some kind of fruiting body. This seems to be the straw that breaks the back of the anthropologist’s resolve. It’s impossible, she says. No human society has ever used that method of writing. Her eyes dart around as if expecting some kind of attack.

You feel obscurely disappointed in her. She was always so much in control when you knew her before. Even when she provoked you to the point of rage, her eyes always contained a kind of mocking calm that stopped you before things went too far.

It had been one of the things that you had loved about her. It had been one of the things that you had hated about her.

The biologist, by contrast, is almost eerily calm, her earlier nervousness no longer evident. Still, when she suggests that you return to the surface, you don’t put up a fight. Your earlier attraction to the depths has been muted, and the idea of exploring further with two companions who aren’t fully committed doesn’t fill you with glee.

It could be your imagination, but as the biologist brushes past you on the way to the surface, she now smells of rotten honey.

The psychologist receives your report expressionlessly until the biologist tells her about the words. She listens with her head half cocked, completely focussed on the biologist. For a moment there’s a flicker of something in her eyes when the biologist is halfway through her recital, but then it’s gone again before you can analyse it.

She’s going down to look at them, she decides. By herself. When she returns to the surface, she’s even more withdrawn into herself than usual. “Interesting,” she says. “I have never seen anything like that before.”

On the surface, it seems a facile statement, obvious and uncontroversial. But something niggles at you, either the way she says it or the look in her eyes.

She’s not telling you the truth. Or at least not the whole truth. You’re sure of it.

The anthropologist doesn’t react well. “Interesting?” she says. “No one has ever seen anything like this in the entire history of the world. No one. *Ever.* And you call it *interesting*?”

It’s so unlike her that for a moment you’re paralysed. The psychologist shows no such hesitation, glaring at the anthropologist until she stammers and drops her gaze to the ground. You’re about to reach out to her or say something and *damn* the consequences, when the psychologist levels a quelling look in your direction as well.

“Can you guarantee that you can maintain your impartiality during the expedition?” she’d asked in the interview room. “Any… entanglements could endanger the rest of the team,” she’d said, her eyes flashing with a veiled mockery. “I do hope you understand.”

“I do,” you had replied. “And I’m a professional.”

“Good,” she’d said. ‘We shouldn’t have a problem then.”

You release your breath and relax. Maybe not now, then, not in the view of the others. But you’re going to need to do something, to help shore her up somehow.

You’re all going to make it out of this. You’re going to make sure of it. And if that means taking care of another team mate - someone who isn’t *just* a team mate - then so be it.

The biologist breaks into the standoff and suggests taking the rest of the day off, to think about things.

Something within you doubts it will be anywhere near that simple.

Regardless, the psychologist agrees and you split up for the afternoon. You finally manage to corner the anthropologist as she’s studying the remains of some cabins. You’re not particularly making an effort to be silent, but she still jumps when you announce your presence by clearing your throat.

“How’re you doing?” you ask.

She still looks a little wide around the eyes, but she looks up at you with a kind of defiance that feels curiously fragile. “I’m perfectly fine, thank you,” she says.

What happened to you, you want to ask. You never used to be this way. Was it something down in the… tunnel, the *tunnel*, or was it earlier. Maybe crossing the boundary to Area X? You can’t quite believe that it’s just life that could have ground her from the woman you had known, who was always in control, to *this*.

All of a sudden, you feel awkward.You shrug. “Well, you know where you can find me.”

She nods, then turns back to her examination of the ruin, clearly as uncomfortable as you are.

You head off. This had been a mistake. But maybe a valuable one, for all of that. Now you know - whatever had been between you and the anthropologist is well and truly buried. She’s a completely different person to how you remembered her and you… you must be a different person if you had ever seen anything in her.

The anthropologist doesn’t look at you when you all gather shortly before dusk, but she doesn’t seem so fragile anymore, either.. Maybe she just did need some time to herself. The psychologist, by contrast, does give you a long look before offering around some beers from the store. You take the proffered bottle from her slowly, some instinct suggesting a trap, but the alcohol helps ease the atmosphere still further. To the point where the biologist, of all people, starts acting like she wants to be friends.

The moans start up at dusk, like always, an old friend heralding the release of pressure from the day. Something *known*, something normal, unlike the abs- the tunnel. The thing you’ll be confronting in the morning.

You almost expect to have dreams of the tunnel that night, but the only thing you remember is the low, muted murmuring of a voice that sounds eerily like that of the psychologist.

When you wake the next day, it’s to find the psychologist standing in the middle of the camp, looking mussed and even shaken in a way that’s very unlike her. She twitches as you emerge from your tent, and her hand goes to her side as if she’s been injured sometime during the night. She looks down at you forbiddingly as you start towards her, an unspoken command to leave her alone.

It’s then that you notice that the anthropologist’s tent is empty, both of her and her personal effects.

“Where is the anthropologist?” you demand.

There’s a noise to the side of you, and the biologist, still rumpled from sleep, emerges from her tent, her gaze mutely flicking between the two of you.

“I talked to her last night,” the psychologist says. “What she saw in that… structure… unnerved her to the point that she did not want to continue with this expedition. She has started back to the border to await extraction. She took a partial report back with her so that our superiors will know our progress.” She smiles as though at a private joke and you know that she’s lying, or at least not telling the whole truth.

But she’s the leader of the expedition, and with one member already not present, you need something more substantial than your gut feeling. You cast your eyes around and find it. “But she left her gear- her gun, too.”

“She only took what she needed so we would have more- including an extra gun.”

“Do you think we need an extra gun?” the biologist asks, cutting in with an air of detached curiosity, as though you weren’t talking about a colleague of yours, and, for a moment, you feel a sudden jagged *hate* for her, exceeding anything you might be feeling for the psychologist.

“I think we don’t know what we need,” the psychologist responds. “But we definitely did not need the anthropologist here if she was unable to do her job.”

These words, at least, as the strength of conviction behind it. But… she’s definitely lying about something, you’re as sure of that as if it were written on her forehead, and what she said about the anthropologist doesn’t ring true. There are wild animals out there. A gun, if not mandatory, would have been highly advisable, and you can’t believe that the anthropologist wouldn’t recognise that. And you feel the remnants of the old loyalty, the feeling that you are betraying her if you don’t make the anthropologist your top priority.

On the other hand, breaking with the leader of your expedition without absolute proof - that goes completely against the way you’ve been trained. And the Area and the tunnel have already been playing with your gut judgments. Maybe it’s the Area trying to break up the group. The third expedition killed each other, after all. And, finally, there’s something inside you that *wants* to trust the psychologist. Even if she *is* lying to you.

Of course, the Area could be playing with that judgment call as well.

In the end, you and the biologist exchange looks, but neither one of you is willing to take that first step and directly confront the psychologist.

“We should continue the plan,” the psychologist says. “We should investigate the…tower,” she continues, looking at the biologist as she uses her favoured term for the abscess. The tunnel.

Immediately the pull towards it starts up again, redoubled in strength. You struggle against it, though. Whatever has happened to the anthropologist, it started there, and the pull… and the push… 

These are things that you can’t measure, can’t make known.

You’ve already lost one member of the expedition, whether to nerves or… or something else. You can’t lose another. You can’t.

And you simply have no way of knowing what kind of danger the abscess presents.

“She’s right,” the biologist says, chipping into your thought processes. “We should continue with the mission. We can make do without the anthropologist.” She looks at you meaningfully as she says that, as though reassuring you that the anthropologist has not been forgotten.

You fold, with bad grace.

Before you really know it, you’re down in the tunnel, breathing mask and helmet in place, with just the biologist for company. The psychologist stayed at the surface, despite your best judgment. To guard the exit, she had said. You had agreed, at the time, but here, with the darkness and the walls and the pull guiding you ever further downwards, you wonder what you had been thinking.

The biologist halts in the open area, looking around wild-eyed.

“What’s wrong?” you ask. “What happened?”

She grabs your hand, holding it flat against the wall. You struggle against her, but she’s got an almost impossible strength and you barely manage to budge her grip. For a moment, you consider trying to manoeuvre yourself so you can bring your rifle to bear on her, despite the lack of space…

“Do you feel that?” she demands, her eyes shadowed.”Can you feel that?”

For a moment, you *can* feel something, a wet ichor that might coat the hole a maggot might eat into an *abscess*, but…

No. It’s stone. You’re not going to let the Area, or the biologist, play with your head any longer.

The biologist stares at you for a second longer, wide-eyed, a desperate emotion playing across her face, before she retreats, both physically and emotionally, releasing you and stepping back at the same time as her face becomes a mask again, as she insists that she just had a brief hallucination.

If the *tunnel* is affecting her the same way it did the anthropologist… you know that you should stop before you go any further, return to the surface. The biologist disagrees, plays it off as just a temporary effect.

You should be strong. Insist. You’re the one with the military training, the assault rifle and, currently, enough space to use it.

But you know it’s too late. You’re already in the current of this place, and you lack the strength to fight it. You *need* to see what’s down here for yourself, to try and make it in some way known.

There’s no way you can walk away from this now.

Maybe that’s why the anthropologist turned back, why she was so desperate to leave, she’d even agree to leave her gun behind. Commitment - to you, at least - had never been her thing.

Your posting had been coming to it’s end - the brass at the base didn’t like to keep anyone apart from ‘essential staff’ there for more than two years at a stretch - and you’d broached the subject of what would happen next, between you.

You had seen her retreating even before you’d finished the question, but you’d tried, regardless. She couldn’t deny that you’d tried. You hadn’t exactly made the suggestion that she could find a job near your next posting in earnest, but she’d given you a jagged smirk and asked if you *really* thought that you meant more to her than her career.

There’d been a point where that might have worked, where sou would have either stormed off or had a flaming row that would result in sex and no further discussion of the topic, but by this point you were used to her games. You’d just given her a little smile in return and told her that she couldn’t blame a girl for trying.

You’d then told her that you only had a year left on this tour, that you could just not re-up and find a position around her. She’d tried to persuade you not to even consider it, that the army had always been the career you’d dreamed off.

You’d told her that sometimes dreams changed.

She’d looked at you for a long moment before kissing you deep and hard, before dragging you off to bed, taking the initiative for once.

It hadn’t felt like a victory, though. There had been something in her eyes, a glint of desperation that had made it feel like a gesture of goodbye than anything else.

She’d said that she’d give the long distance thing her all, but you hadn’t really been surprised when the relationship had failed, when the calls came less and less frequently and even when you managed a visit, she hadn’t really seemed all there.

She’d already given up, left, despite what she had said.

You always had been able to tell when she had been lying. Then.

As you descend the steps, the words written in green flow alongside you. Closer inspection reveals that it’s ‘written’ in a luminescent fern-like moss that the biologist assures you is probably some kind of fungi. There are creatures hidden in this miniature forest, small translucent hand-like creatures. You can’t help thinking they remind you of white blood cells. Which would make the moss, the writing…

You shake your head. It’s not worth letting your mind getting drawn down those kind of thoughts. 

Just the facts.

The stairs descend in a large spiral, describing a circle 61 feet in diameter on the inside wall - the size of the slab above. Whatever it was, you had only been permitted into the very top of it, thereafter exiled to its edges.

You’ve descended what must be over a hundred feet vertically when you’re the one to notice that the writing in the darkness above seems to be getting fresher.

Brighter. You meant brighter, but fresher slips out of your mouth before you can help it. The biologist gives you a quizzical look and you correct to more recent.

She suggests that you both turn off your lights, and it takes a moment for you to agree. Not just because the darkness makes the biologist that much more dangerous should she… take another turn, but because you’re uncertain that you actually want to know the answer. Want to know whether something is writing on the walls in blood. Not blood, fungus.

There’s only one way to treat this rationally. You turn off the light on your rifle and the one on your helmet.

In the darkness, the truth is plain. The words are brighter.

“Something below us is writing this script,” the biologist says, echoing your thoughts.

Logically, there must be an intelligence behind this. Logically, it must be *someone*, not something.

Despite what your instincts are telling you. 

Instincts lie. Have been lying ever since you got here.

The biologist just looks blank when you point out that she said something, not someone, like it isn’t even something she *can* consider. You tell her to get out her gun and just hope that you’re not making a terrible mistake by doing so.

Another a hundred and fifty feet or so downwards, and you realise that the floor being sticky underneath your feet is not your imagination or some kind of effect of the tunnel. There’s something on the staircase, and it’s not water.

The biologist takes this discovery in her stride, evincing absolutely not surprise at all, and you can’t help wondering if she knows more about the tunnel than she’s saying. Or at least *thinks* she knows - if she’s seen more things and just not told you.

Whether you’re travelling deeper and deeper into this abscess, and your only companion has already been infected.

She ducks down to examine the fluid, and pronounces it viscous, like slime, and over half an inch thick. The light reflecting off it reveals a golden colour flecked with the crimson of drying blood. Despite her biological experience, she doesn’t give any kind of explanation for what could have made the patterns left in the slime, a mix of ellipses and lines. You try to sort them out into some kind of pattern, but every time you think you’ve managed to divine some kind of order, it changes again.

It’s then that you spot the boot mark in the slime. Like yours, only travelling upwards.

Someone else had been down here, and not too long ago.

It’s enough to give you pause. Logically, it’s enough that you should go up to report this find. Either the psychologist already knows - and hasn’t told you - or she needs to know.

It’s the smart move. The winning play.

But the tunnel pulls you ever further down, the bloodstream of the words washing you ever further downwards, the letters pulsing to the rhythm of the unseen heart.

“Should we go back?” the biologist asks with a small, secret smile, as if she already knows what you’re going to say.

You oblige her. “Just around the corner,” you say. “Just a little further, and then we will go back.”

The slime gets thicker as you go ever further downwards, soon becoming a tint rather than a sheen, then obscuring the stone of the steps completely.

All the better to ease our descent into the depths.

It might be another twenty feet down, another fifty, another hundred before the spiralling of the staircase brings *something* out of the darkness, limned in gold, slumped down against the outer wall.

You spring back, hands already gripping your rifle.

Your mind immediately leaps to the writer in the darkness. ‘Bring forth from the seeds of the dead,’ echoes through your mind. 

Someone. Whatever it was, it had to be a someone. The other shapes your mind conjures are too…

The biologist grabs your by the shoulders, snapping you out of the semi-trance you’d fallen into. You instinctively try to bring the rifle to bear, but, luckily, she’s too close for you to do so.

“You said it’s like a person sitting down against the base of the wall,” she says, and despite the fact that you’re both wearing masks, you swear that you can smell rotten honey on her breath. “That’s *not* what we’ve been tracking. This has to do with the *other boot print*. You know that.”

Her words calm you, reassure you. It isn’t the writer. And, now that you can think more clearly, you’re as reluctant to go up right now as she is. The thought of leaving that sale in the darkness behind you, undefined, unknown, waiting…

You need to see it before you can return to the surface.

The biologist pushes past you, takes the lead as she cautiously approaches the form on the ground, but she only studies it briefly before continuing on past and down the stairs a little way. You should call out, stop her, do *something*, but you find yourself rooted to the spot, unable to do anything except stare at the slumped, sprawled *shape*.

It’s a body. It must be a body, you try and convince yourself. You’re so focused on that thought that the biologist’s return takes you by surprise.

“Keep watch while I look at the body,” she says.

“It *is* a body?” you find yourself asking.

The look she gives you is unreadable, even peculiar.

“It’s the anthropologist.”


	3. Chapter 3

For a moment, the biologist’s words only register as white noise, as something you absolutely *cannot* deal with down here in the heart of the abscess. You step past her, eyes glancing away from the- the *shape* on the floor, until the only thing you can focus on is the golden floor reflecting dimly in the darkness.

Slowly, slowly you probe at the thought that you’ve failed, that not everyone is getting out of this alive. That the anthropologist, the woman you had loved, that you had considered giving up the army for, is dead.

It must be that the latter is still too big to encompass that the former is the one you can’t stop focussing on. Why you can’t stop probing at the thought that she’s dead like pressing your tongue to a sore tooth. Can’t stop glancing over your shoulder at the body, trying to… trying to… trying to feel something other than a numbness.

Other than a niggling, detached, curiosity about what fruits her dead body might bring.

“What happened to her?” you ask.

“I think she interrupted the creator of the script on the wall,” the biologist replies after a moment.

“And it did that to her?” you ask. What could it have written on her, you almost ask, but don’t. What words could have bled into her veins before she died?

And could it be writing something on you as well?

The biologist doesn’t answer, either your spoken or unspoken questions, and you find yourself grateful. Maybe there are some things that you don’t need to measure, to make known.

You hear the biologist moving behind you. Risking a glance, you see her moving slowly up the stairs, examining the ground as she does so. She’s almost out of sight when she stops, then walks back down again.

“What did you find?” you ask, almost hoping that she’ll say nothing.

She doesn’t.

“Another person was here with the anthropologist”, she tells you, shows you the second set of footprints that stop shy of the body. You know who she’s going to say this was, a sickening drop in your stomach that’s suddenly the most real thing about this entire experience. “It must have been the psychologist,” she says. “She must have walked the anthropologist here under hypnotic control, and forced her to try and take a sample from whatever was writing on the wall.” Her eyes go past you, to the wall next to the body. “It didn’t go well,” she says, with a slight smile on her face.

A wave of impossible anger at the biologist washes over you, followed by sheer disbelief. You can’t believe that the psychologist would do this, *could* do this. The hypnotic controls had been placed for your own protection, to help keep you stable in the environment of Area X.

There was simply no way that they could be used to control you like the biologist was suggesting.

With a gleam of almost malicious amusement in her eyes, the biologist tells you that the psychologist had, in fact, already been doing that to you this trip. That she had implanted a suggestion so that you would be more likely to enter the tower, no, the abscess, no, the *tunnel* this morning. And that she, the biologist, had conveniently developed an immunity to these suggestions during the course of the journey.

You don’t know how much you can trust her. After all, if these commands exist, who’s to say that *she* couldn’t have used them to kill the anthropologist? And your heart whispers for you to trust the psychologist, your leader, the person who guided you through the border.

In the end, there’s only one thing you can do. Try to put instinct to one side and trust the measurements. The psychologist must surely have her own version of events. Whatever the truth, the answers have to lie above, not down here in the pulsing… in the depths.

The biologist, naturally, wants to go up first, to let whatever may occur happen without your intervention, without you being able to witness it, where the survivor of any incident can give their own version of events without any fear of contradiction.

You, naturally, disagree, and she gives in with bad grace.

The ascent is harder than the descent had been. Not merely because gravity is working against you, but because it almost feels like the air itself has started to congeal, like you’re moving through something like the secretions underfoot, like it’s moving through you, gelidly running through your veins into your heart and head,

It’s a nonsense, a symptom of shock most likely. You’ve just found the body of the person you loved, once upon a time. Mild hallucinations are a not uncommon symptom.

That’s what it must be.

But you can’t help remembering the face of the biologist as she wrestled your wrist to the wall, when she tried to laugh it off as an illusion, and you wonder…

What did the anthropologist feel as she was walking down those steps? What did she think the writer of the words look like, before it did *that* to her?

Did anyone else have to be involved at all? Or was she just the first victim of the abscess?

To distract yourself, you keep careful track of the number of stairs you climb, the gradient they describe, the distance between what landmarks there had been on the endless stair, etch them into your mind as if by knowing them you can make this place more comprehensible. You construct a map of the abscess in your head, until you are comprised of nothing but that and the constant, constant movement.

50 steps, 100, 150… You blink and suddenly you’re at the top of the stairs, staring out at the dimness of the chamber just beneath the surface. You don’t have any conscious recollection of the time spent ascending, but you’ve got a perfect map in your head, and an exact count of the number of steps you climbed - 2076. You feel slightly attenuated, as though some part of you resides in the map, is still down there in the depths with the steps, and the anthropologist. And the writer of the words.

You stumble to a halt with the sudden clarity of it all, but the biologist pushes past you, determinedly walking towards the exit, hand resting on the butt of her handgun and you rush to catch up with her.

There’s no way that you’re going to let her get out of here first, to spin whatever truth she pleases.

As you haul yourself up out of the open sore, your stomach tenses. Your gut still insists that you should trust the psychologist, that there’s a reasonable explanation behind all this. A voice in the darkness of your mind asks if there’s anything reasonable about Area X at all.

The bright light hits your eyes as you emerge, blinding you momentarily despite the fact you stared up at the sky whilst in the open sore, just to avoid this. When your vision clears, when the pressure, that had once gripped you like a fist, that was now more like a whisper down your spine, reasserts itself, it’s to reveal a world devoid of the psychologist.

You share a glance with the biologist, who seems as nonplussed as you. As one, you move towards the spot you’d all had lunch after that first expedition into the depths, and then the place you’d first spotted the abscess from, and then the spot which you’d noted out loud had the best view of the area, and then every other place that you can even vaguely remember anyone having gone, all with a rising urgency demanding that she has to around here somewhere, she *has* to be. Somehow the thought that she isn’t here, she isn’t somewhere *known* is even worse than even the thought that she may have killed the anthropologist.

“She’s gone,” the biologist finally says and you almost hit her for it before you regain control of yourself. It’s not her fault that the psychologist isn’t here, no matter the fact that she’s the one to verbalise, make it real.

“Maybe she’s back at the camp,” you say tightly. At least that’d be somewhere known.

“Would you agree that her absence is a sign of guilt?” the biologist asks, pressing your fraying temper almost beyond endurance.

“No, I would not,” you reply shortly. “Maybe something happened to her. Maybe she needed to go back to camp.” It’s all you can hold onto, right now.

You find yourself sticking to the known routes on your way back to camp, even to the point of stepping in old footprints when you can. It’s as though something in the depths of the abscess has injured your ability to withstand the new, or as if you can hide from the attention of Area X if you avoid disturbing its pristine wilderness any further.

The psychologist isn’t at the camp when you return, and neither are half the supplies and most of the guns. There isn’t any sign of a struggle, nor any sign that the locked containers had been forced. You collapse into a chair after checking, rechecking, twice, three times. You can’t think of an explanation other than the one the biologist fed you. Somehow it’s this, the loss of the psychologist, your leader, that breaks what’s left of your initiative.

“So what the hell are we going to do now?” you ask the biologist as she rummages around in the anthropologist’s tent for some unknown reason of her own.

She emerges, looking frustrated, as though the hunt through the belongings of your dead comrade - your dead lover - hadn’t yielded whatever benefit she had hoped. “We examine the samples I took, we develop the photographs and go through them. Then, tomorrow, we probably go back down into the tower.”

For a moment, you can only look at her. For a moment, you can feel the pull of it again, the feeling that some part of you is still there, before you return to yourself. “No. I’m not going down into that place. And it’s-“ an abscess, “a *tunnel*, not a tower,” you remind her, remind yourself.

You want to get out of here, return to the border, return to something *known*. Something almost alien flickers in her eyes, something that reminds you of the wilderness around you, as she considers your words before pressing you to stay. In the end, you come to a compromise - you’ll examine what you managed to pull out of the depths today, and decide what to do tomorrow.

Developing the pictures takes time - you have to use chemicals and a tent that doubles as a darkroom - it’s old school, just like everything else around here. Just like everything you carried in with you. Nothing digital or computerised, it’s like you’re stuck inside a show set decades ago. You can’t help wondering if there’s a message in there for you - what you weren’t allow to have, and what you were.

And, of course, the results are useless. Any picture you took of the words is a smear of light and darkness. Any picture you took of anything else is just dark. The biologist doesn’t seem any more pleased with the samples she took. She even asks you to look at one set of slides before she does, not that it reveals anything she shares with you.

It’s almost like the abscess refuses to reveal anything about itself to you. Almost, except the map of its interior that’s still burnt into your mind, that you can access even without closing your eyes. It’s almost like a joke of a particularly unfunny kind.

Evening falls, with its accompanying sentinel, the moan. This time, though, it brings a sense of impending dread with it, as though something terrible is approaching. You try to hold onto it for as long as possible, but it when it finally fades to nothingness, you’re left with a silent darkness that feels far too much like the depths of the abscess, an unknown that is trying to write itself on you.

The biologist shows no such reservations, staring entranced into the darkness, even as rain starts to fall, almost like she’s high. Maybe that should worry you more, but one team mate is dead and your team leader is missing with most of your arsenal. The thought occurs that the biologist might at least be easier to handle if she’s… impaired.

In the end, though, you take first shift - just in case the psychologist decides to return under cover of darkness - leaving the biologist to sleep off whatever has affected her, as the storm builds above you. At least the lightning and the thunder is something to hold onto, something normal that at least feels *known*. After a while, it’s almost easy to lose yourself in the display. Several times, the only thing that grounds you is a persistent irritation in one wrist that you can’t seem to stop scratching.

The end of your shift arrives, and you debate whether or not to wake the biologist to take her turn. On the one hand, if you don’t, you’ll be in no fit state to do anything tomorrow. On the other, you can’t help wondering how much you can trust the biologist and her state of mind. Not to mention what might happen if the psychologist comes back whilst she is the only person awake.

The choice is taken out of your hands when, with a start, you realise that, despite the rain, you just drifted off. You wake the biologist then retire to your tent, being careful to keep your rifle with you, just in case.

You dream that night of the anthropologist, alive again and here with you in the Area, dancing with you around the fire to some unheard music. The only places lit, the only places safe, are the places you know, but the darkness calls to you, wants you to look at it, wants you to *know* it. Every time you get distracted, the anthropologist moves her head in front of you, says, “Look at me, love. Just focus on me.”

But slowly, slowly you realise that there’s something wrong with her. Maybe it’s the way her smile seems like more of a rictus. Maybe it’s the way that her words don’t quite sound like she’s saying them.

Maybe it’s the way that there’s something behind her, moving in the darkness.

But every time you try and look past her, her head flops in the way. “Look at me, love. Just focus on me,” she says, and whirls you away, always to the unknown beat.

Finally, you can’t take any more, and you shove her aside, sending her stumbling to the ground. Standing behind her is the psychologist, her hand melded with the anthropologist’s back up to her wrist. She looks at you with a mocking smile on her lips, raises the index finger of her free hand up to her lips and you can see the tendons twitch on her other arm.

“Look at me, love,” the fallen body of the anthropologist says. “Focus on me.”

You wake, somehow managing the stifle the scream that almost erupts from your throat.

It’s nothing, you tell yourself. It’s just a conflation of the shock of finding the anthropologist’s corpse and the biologist’s theories. Nothing more. Nothing more.

In the end, no matter how much you try, you can’t even convince yourself of that.

As you get dressed you notice that the spot on your wrist, the spot that was itching last night, the spot that the biologist pressed against the wall yesterday when you were down in the abscess has been scratched raw and bloody during the night. You examine your other hand - you’ve always kept your nails extremely short - but can’t find any trace of blood underneath them. In the end, you do your best - you clean the wound with antiseptic and bandage it thoroughly.

It’s probably not enough. There’s almost undoubtedly nothing that any supply you have in this camp can do against anything that could go straight through the gloves you’d been wearing. In the final analysis, though, there’s simply nothing else you can do. 

The day is bright and clear, with a blue sky that defies last night’s storm. The lighthouse stands tall and dark against the horizon, and for the first time you really *look* at it, rather than simply using it as a referent point, an immutable fact of the Area.

It’s the only thing constructed by man that has survived the Area untouched, uncorroded by the unseen force that has devoured, in whole or in part, everything else that humans have touched. How? You can’t help wondering. How has this alone managed to persist?

Looking at it you can’t help remembering a shipyard you visited on a school trip, of a ship hauled out of the water for a refit, warped and swollen metal being stripped away and replaced. You remember being told how sacrificial zinc attachments were attached to the hull, so they’d be destroyed instead of the iron.

If the lighthouse is an artificial, unwanted intrusion into the Area, then what would be protecting it? What would the sacrifice be? Something brought in to suffer the effects, replaced at regular intervals.

The expeditions.

Suddenly, you can’t get the idea out of your head, the image of one set of people after another, funnelled in through the border, melting and corroding, one person after another. Because no matter whether they make it back or not, you can’t imagine anyone visiting this so-called pristine wilderness and being untouched afterwards.

No matter what the reports might have said.

You shake your head, look away from the lighthouse. It’s a fanciful thought, nothing more. There’s certainly not a shred of evidence behind it.

If the biologist is tired from being up half the night, she doesn’t show it. She’s still got that half stoned look about her, as though she’s either only vaguely aware of anything or hyper-aware of everything.

“The psychologist is in the lighthouse,” she says, without preamble, and for a moment it feels like she just walked straight over your grave, as though she had somehow known that you’d been thinking about it. And even after your nightmare, even after everything that happened the day before, the thought of the psychologist being there all alone gives you a tight knot in your chest.

You dismiss all of that and glare at her. “So?”

“You don’t want to find out if she’s there?”

The distance between here and there, all that *unknown* land that you’d have to make *known*, the sheer amount of your substance that you’d have to stretch out like a veil over every step you’d have to take stretches out in front of your mind’s eye and you have to repress a shudder.

No.

No, there’s no way you’re going to do this.

You turn down her suggestion on practical grounds - that the lighthouse is a high position with a clear view of the surrounding land, that there are weapons known to be cached there, but that’s not the reason you refuse her. 

Not the real reason.

There’s only so much of you left after the trip into the abscess, and you need to stay still for a while, gather yourself, before you can even think about any more trips into the unknown.

She tries to bargain with you. She tries to threaten you. She even tries to use your implanted hypnotic controls against you, but either she can’t or they’ve stopped working on you too.

In the end, she gives up and starts in the direction of the lighthouse, leaving you all by yourself.

The first thing you do is scout the camp again, impressing the environs into your mind, to make sure that the biologist didn’t make any changes during her watch. As if by examining everything, you can fix it, keep it constant.

Keep it *known*.

Make it safe.

The morning passes swiftly as you mark bearings and distances anew, making sure that they all match your initial measurements, that nothing has changed, that what remains of the stores haven’t moved anywhere, somehow, since you examined them yesterday. You quickly fall into a routine, a pleasing routine, that helps soothe your nerves.

That lets you feel almost normal again.

At some point you find yourself staring at a partially hidden tripwire, the basic defence of the camp, and you can’t help thinking that there are two people out there you don’t - can’t - trust. You swear softly to yourself, then start sketching out new shapes, new configurations for them, sketching out a beautiful flower whose petals will warn you if anything intrudes. 

Anyone. If anyone intrudes.

After you come up with a design that you can live with, you start the process of digging up the tripwires, replanting them and finally hiding them as best you can. It’s tiring work, calming work that allows your mind to relax even as you exert your muscles.

You’re going to sleep well tonight. You can’t help feeling ambivalent about whether that’s a good thing or not.

Your mind drifts as you work. You remember the last night you spent with the anthropologist, the last night of that last visit. You’d both fucked with an air of desperation - every time the rhythm seemed to be winding down, one or other of you had increased the tempo again, reluctant to let this night end.

There hadn’t been any talk the previous evening about when you’d next visit. She hadn’t even needed to distract you, to wind you up like she normally did.

This was the end, and you both had known it.

It was some time in the early dawn, the grey light shrouding you both, and you’d finally stopped, too sore and too tired to continue. You’d thought that she had fallen asleep when she started speaking.

“Leave,” she’d rumbled quietly against you. “Get out of here. Don’t come back again. Don’t ever come back. And if you ever see me again, if you ever even hear from me again. Run. Run and don’t look back.” She’d said it all with an emotion you’d never heard from her before. Sadness, maybe. Resignation, perhaps.

Something about the time - the in-between moment between night and day, between wakefulness and sleep - had just kept you still, unresponsive, almost trancelike. Truthfully, you’d never even been sure that she’d known that you had been awake, that her words had been intended for your conscious mind.

You’d never brought them up again, not the next morning, not during training when you’d met her again.

You can’t help wondering, now, if this is what she’d meant, somehow. A warning against ending up in this place, with her corpse buried hundreds of feet deep in an abscess, blooming, bearing some unknown fruit.

You can’t help wondering how she’d known.

The evening eventually comes, but the moan has an accompaniment this time - a jet of green unearthly light shoots up from next to the lighthouse, illuminating one side of it. Somehow, it feels like a harbinger. 

Or maybe an ending.

Instead of euphoria, the end of the moan brings dizziness. 

Unconsciousness.

It must be unconsciousness, because of the dreams that come.

The dreams that come.

It feels like you explode out of your skin, like you’re finally free, like you become dust, become the wind that races across the Area and across the sea.

Like you’re dipping down to see the biologist running beneath you, rising up to graze the top of the lighthouse. 

Like you’re circling around again, racing over the land again, dipping down into the camp again only to see more tents, more people, fading in and out like ghosts, than were ever present in the expedition.

Your expedition.

You feel like you know *everything*.

And it *knows* you.

Oh, it knows you.

Finally, finally the first rays of light touch the horizon, and you can feel the pressure again, only whisper light, shadow strong.

But enough.

Enough that you manage to claw your way back inside your body, become something more - and less - than the dust on the wind. 

You open your eyes. Your body aches. Patches scratched raw litter it. Maybe you did it with your nails. Maybe you didn’t. You can hope it *was* your nails. But you don’t believe it.

All along, you thought that the pressure during the day, like Area X was clenched around you like a *fist*, was something external. You’re beginning to think it wasn’t though. Maybe the pressure is something else entirely, maybe it’s the difference between what’s you and what’s not you, between the internal and the outside.

Maybe you never felt it before because, in the outside world, you never needed to feel it before. Because there was nothing trying to burrow in, trying to *know* you.

And the fact that you felt *nothing* at night…

Well, apparently that’s very, very bad.

You prop yourself up, to try and take a look at your injuries, but just the movement makes the world spin around you, makes the sky pinwheel above you, makes everything fade to black once more.

Then you dream. Properly. You dream of *her*, the anthropologist. All your time together, from the bar where you first met, to the discussions and the arguments you had, to the nights you spent together.

Even to the end, the bitter end.

Only this time, it’s like every memory is a series of photos, and every photo is ripped down the middle. And where the anthropologist once was, the psychologist now fits.

And she fits so, *so*, much better than the anthropologist ever did. From the way you looked up to her when you first met, to the way she’d smile, to the way she could take always you apart at the seams.

It’s her.

It’s always been her.

And of course, of *course* you’d answered when she called six months ago. Asking if you’d be willing to carry out a special mission for the country. Even the world, she’d intimated. And you’d accepted, like a fool.

Maybe you really are more of a romantic than you’d ever thought.

And she’d taken it all away, in those sessions in the white room. Locked every memory of herself away, under hypnotic suggestion, and filled her space with the anthropologist.

She’d never fit, of course, and maybe that had been the point.

As you groggily regain consciousness, you wonder what happens now that you’ve regained your memories. Or whether it’s just too late.

That latter feeling intensifies as you examine the wounds your night left in your body. Most of them are only surface deep, but some of them are deeper, muscle deep. And in some, the deepest, there is a hint of discolouration, as though your body at its core is now green and gold, the same colour as the letters in the abscess.

You can’t help wondering what is being written on you.

But you know, *know*, with a bone-deep certitude that it isn’t finished yet.

You remember hearing stories of doctors who entered hot zones, knowing that they would be infected, knowing that whatever happened, that they wouldn’t be allowed out if they presented symptoms.

You always wondered if those stories were apocryphal, if anyone would really do that.

You know now.

You’re infectious. You *know* this.

You can’t be allowed out into the world. And you don’t want to see what fruits will come from your body. But you have until nightfall before you have to make that decision, before the pressure fades and the Area rips you free of your body once again.

The others…

The anthropologist is dead, but the others went to the lighthouse, so you follow in their footsteps. An hour passes, and something glimmers in the distance, slowly getting closer. 

You take cover, look at it through your scope.

It’s the biologist, and she’s glowing like she’s on fire. There’s no mistake. She’s infected as well.

She’s part of your team. Possibly the only other surviving member. None of you can make it back. None. You have to make sure of it.

You aim your rifle at her centre of mass.

And you pull the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to Lorraine for prompting me to write this, and thank you to Louisa for being equal parts beta and cheerleader.


End file.
